They all look innocently grandmotherly and grandfatherly now, but when they were whipper-snappers, the Halloween night covered many a dark deed.

Folks at senior functions in West Allis and Greenfield recalled some of their dark deeds. It was a time when mischief was often winked at, and there were actually tricks on trick or treat.

"We were just naughty, is what we were," said Denise Koenig, director of the West Allis Senior Center.

"I had this Uncle Billy," she said. He piled Denise and all her little ghost and goblin cousins into his station wagon and off they would go to trick-or-treat. However, woe to those in their rural Elk Mound, Wisconsin, environs who were not home to give treats on Halloween night.

Look out

"If they were not home, we tricked," Denise recalled with pleasure. "There was a herd of us," and they fanned out to explore all the sheds and outbuildings at homes where they got no answer. Then they dragged everything in the sheds that wasn't nailed down onto the porches of the homes and shoved them against the front doors and the back doors to boot. They piled up all kinds of things — wagons, bicycles, rain barrels and small pieces of equipment.

Halloween marauders swooped down on houses in the dark of night.(Photo: kirstypargeter, Getty Images/iStockphoto)

But they had only begun their tricks. They came armed with wax that they used to draw big Xs on the windows, she said.

Denise said, "I think they used it (the wax) for canning on top of homemade jelly."

"And then toilet paper, of course," for the trees and bushes, she said.

"The first house where no one was home usually got hit the hardest. I think it was because we were so enthusiastic," she said.

In that small farming community, everybody knew who the Halloween marauders were, she said.

"But nobody retaliated because Uncle Billy was so generous in taking us all out," she said, although she did remember having to help clean up one time.

Looking back, she said, "If it was a nice warm night and the moon was shining bright. We had a field day."

A carved and lighted pumpkin placed among what appears to be tombstones is a stunning Halloween sight.(Photo: FREDERIC J. BROWN, AFP/Getty Images)

Diaper dad

Barbara Denter at the Greenfield Community Center was usually a good goblin, but her brother went a little wild one Halloween. The father of seven young children went trick-or-treating in his new neighborhood dressed in nothing but a diaper and holding a bottle. Her bro was quite a sight.

"He's short and chubby and really white," Barbara said, laughing.

He went trick-or-treating all by himself. He found his new neighbors were so charmed that they gave him treats — beer for his bottle. The Halloween hijinks took place around 103rd Street and Hampton Avenue.

Rampages remembered

Back at the West Allis Senior Center, Cliff Wallengang remembered the Halloween rampages he and his pals carried out. They didn't bother ringing doorbells to get treats; they went straight to the tricks. And they came prepared with bags of crushed up coal to dump on porches.

"People had coal furnaces back then," and the boys, all 11 and 12, would break up some and scoop it into bags, he said.

They also soaped up windows and TP to finish off decorating the trees.

"That looked gorgeous in the morning," he said.

"It was four or five guys and we were all over the neighborhood," Cliff, now 83, remembered.

There was plenty of irony in their Halloween raids in the Holton and North avenue area.

"We were good Catholic boys, went to Catholic grade school and we terrorized the neighborhood," he said.

Daring

The boys were pretty daring, too, because the families were home during all this nighttime mischief. But the boys were quiet "and then we ran like heck," laughing, but with a tingle of fear of being caught, he said. Nobody ever caught them.

"We had a ball. We couldn't wait to do it," said Cliff, who grew up to be the multi-state regional director of a car rental company, the father of four children, grandfather of eight and great-grandfather of four.

Halloween was a wild time.(Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Halloween night also was a wild time for Barry Nemson, West Allis, and his four pals. And outhouses were sometimes the casualties.

"We used to dump over _ _ _ _ ters," out in the country around Pewaukee Lake, where the boys, all ages 10 to 14, lived.

"It was great," he said with relish.

And it was harmless.

"A couple guys could tip them right back up," Nemson said.

He grew up to be the speech writer and aid for the president and CEO of the manufacturing giant J. I. Case Co. and for other Case executives. He also become a volunteer firefighter in Fox Point, where he raised his family.

Candy king

One trick-or-treater who was definitely in it for the treats was the 8-year-old son of Joyce Wisniewski, Greenfield. He and his pals would trick or treat for hours around 36th Street and Oklahoma Avenue on Halloween night, with her son coming back again and again with a full bag and coming back for an empty one.

The trick was that he didn't even care for candy. He just loved the joy of it all on Halloween night.

Halloween is the time to look for candy treats.(Photo: Courtesy of Matt Rose)

But if you did want candy, bars were the place to go, Marty Hernandez and Carryl Mercer, both members and volunteers at the West Allis center, said.

"I learned very young not to go to residences," Carryl said. "Bars are where you get the big candy bars, not those little ones."

The bar owner would give the candy bars and patrons would look at her in costume and say, "Oh, you're so cute," and toss pennies and nickles into her bag, she said.

A few blocks from her house at 4th Street and National Avenue, "And I was loaded," she said.

Day after

Marty had exactly the same experience as he and his pals hit the bars around 3rd Street and Greenfield Avenue. The next day he would show off the bounty at school.

"I'd pull out that big candy bar and they would say, 'Where did you get that?'" All very satisfying, Marty said.

By contrast, the day after Halloween just brought Sally Goggins, West Allis, the sight of her beloved bicycle up in the family's apple tree. They lived at 93rd Street and Hayes Avenue.

The suspect in the case was her big brother. He was 16 and she was 10.

"Old enough for shenanigans," Sally said. Brother grew up to be a librarian in New Mexico.

A witch flies on a broom on a spooky Halloween night.(Photo: DNY59, Getty Images)

Girl Scouts, too?

While future librarians can be imps on Halloween, so can Girl Scouts.

It was Halloween night and the girls were on a camping trip at a Girl Scout camp near East Troy, remembered Shirley Cogan, West Allis. All the scary stories had been told around the bonfire that had snapped fiery sparks into the dark night and it was time to turn in. Their troop leader had retired to her tent, expecting to climb into her comfortable pajamas that she had earlier laid out on top of her sleeping bag.

What? No pajamas?

Coming out of her tent, she looked up. There, flapping from the flagpole were her pajamas.

"We all kept innocent faces," she said of the half of the troop that was in on the prank. But then everybody was dismayed that the wind had wound the PJs' legs around the flagpole and they couldn't get them down.

Eventually, the leader had to sleep in her clothes. The maintenance man mailed the PJs back to her, later, Shirley said.

It was after midnight but Halloween wasn't over.

The scout leader was out for revenge.

"She shook the flaps of the tents. She scared the B'jesus out of us. It was so fun," Shirley said.

She grew up to be a special-education teacher and the leader's daughter, who had swiped her mother's pajamas from off her sleeping bag, became a nurse.

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